The World Wide Web has expanded to provide web services faster to consumers. Web services may be provided by a web application which uses one or more services to handle a transaction. The applications may be distributed over several machines, making the topology of the machines that provides the service more difficult to track and monitor.
Agents are often utilized by application monitoring systems to monitor an application, collect data, and report the data. These agents are usually software that are static in nature. Once created, the agents are installed and are usually not changed. In the rare situation where an agent does need to be changed, it usually requires restarting the java virtual machine on which the agent resides.
What is needed is an improved system for updating an agent while minimizing the effect on the underlying code being monitored.